The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) is being developed to replace the current NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) and the DoD Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) systems. The instruments generally will represent significant improvements over the current operational sensors. For example, the Visible-IR Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) with 22 channels will be replacing the 5-channel Advanced Very High Resolution (AVHRR) on the POES system and the 3-channel Operational Line Scanner (OLS) on the DMSP system. Measurements of the sea surface temperature from NPOESS will come from the VIIRS instrument. The sea surface temperature Environmental Data Record (EDR) will be derived from the moderate resolution thermal emissive channels covering the short-wave and long-wave infrared spectral regions (3.7 to 12.05 µm). Both skin and bulk sea surface temperature will be retrieved. The VIIRS sea surface temperature retrieval algorithm is described and performance results using both simulated and MODIS proxy data are presented.